


to wage this war (against your faith in me)

by writedeku



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Stiles, BC I SAY SO, Depression, Derek Uses His Words, Derek is a Good Alpha, Fluff and Angst, Hurt and comfort, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, Post-Nemeton, Post-Nogitsune Stiles Stilinski, Stiles Needs a Hug, Stiles Stilinski is Part of the Pack, attempted suicide, i have to hurt the ones i love, post 3b, the pack is alive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 00:44:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6494152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writedeku/pseuds/writedeku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek watches him warily. Stiles curls back up on his bed and hurts. Derek walks over to him and awkwardly stands over him. “Is there something wrong?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Okay,” Derek looks at him uncomfortably. “No, not okay. Tell me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	to wage this war (against your faith in me)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everyone! I bounced off so many ideas before settling on this (i hear a half written spy AU in the distance). This is my first teen wolf fanfic so yeah! Hope you guys like it. Title taken from the MCR song: you know what they do to guys like us in prison.
> 
> WARNING: STILES IS RLY SAD IN THIS. LIKE SUPER SAD. DEREK MAKES IT BETTER, BUT THERE ARE MENTIONS OF SUICIDE, SUICIDE ATTEMPTS, LAURA'S DEATH, THEIR BOATLOAD OF ISSUES, ETC.

Stiles stares at his ceiling, then at the alarm clock next to his bed that won’t stop ringing. He finds that he could not care less about the fact that the beeps were speeding up and let it, the beeps reaching a point when it sounded like it is going to explode. It hits a maximum screech like it was giving its final effort, and then the silence that followed is louder than the alarm had ever been. Stiles reaches out his fingers as if there is someone next to him in the bed. He aches for someone to touch- to hold, to have, he wanted it so much he thought might crawl out of his skin.

It isn’t that Stiles doesn’t have people, he does, and he touches them all the time. He put Erica's stray curls behind her ear and his hand on Derek's shoulder. He braids Lydia's hair and likes to put his hand on the side of Scott's face when he told him that he was an idiot. But the fact that Stiles touched so many people was the problem because no one ever touched him back of their own accord.

Stiles rolls over in his bed and thinks he is being pathetic. He'd literally faced down an alpha pack with a baseball bat, fuck, he had died- and yet he can’t even get out of bed and go to school. The floor seems so far away. He stretches out his arm like it'd help and when it doesn’t he takes it back, pulls up the comforter and goes back to sleep.

His dad doesn’t come in to wake him up, so he wakes blearily from a dream of eternal darkness and streets running with blood. He turns around, sits up, and stares at the white wall his bed was pushed up against. It is a psychological thing- he knew it when he reorganised his room specifically so that the bed would be against the wall. People afraid of the dark tended to prefer beds against a wall or a window as a protection, a bodyguard, a reassurance that there was one side they wouldn't be attacked from. He knew it and he'd done it anyway, no matter how sad it made him feel. He'd changed the cupboards he had, now it was made of rowan and had a locked area. In it housed a pair of hunting knives, two handguns, a shotgun, a revolver and a long-distance rifle, several hundred rounds of wolfsbane bullets, along with five kilograms of mountain ash and pure wolfsbane. He'd taken them from Chris Argent's store when he'd left for France together with Allison on a _sorry you nearly died because of our family’s poor life choices_ holiday. Stiles had now evolved a paranoid bastard who sees evil in the eyes of a five-year-old boy who lived down the street and liked to wear his hair in pigtails.

He should get up now, it is ten in the morning and he is later than he has any right to be. He looks at the floor, and it recedes from him, and his legs don’t want to obey his brain. So he put his head back down on the pillow and wanders.

He is jerked back into reality when his phone started to ring. He thinks he should answer it. He doesn’t. 

His phone rings again. He picks it up.

"Dude," an enthusiastic, slightly paranoid voice bursts out over the line, it's Scott and he's happy and a thing inside Stiles wants to break something. "Where are you? Are you kidnapped or anything? You're okay, right, because you aren't in school and our life is all kinds of messed up and- Stiles?"

Stiles remembers he can actually move his mouth to communicate. "Yeah," he says, his voice hoarse. "Yeah, I'm just not feeling well."

There's a long pause on the other end. Stiles can’t remember the time he was last sick, and judging from the skeptical silence, neither can Scott. "It was bound to happen eventually," Stiles shrugs, even though he knows Scott couldn't see him. "I think it had to do with  _someone_ pushing me into a lake."

He says it with enough of his old humour to get Scott to laugh and promise to stop by before hanging up. Stiles drops the phone like he's been burned by it and it skitters across the floor. He watches this with remote detachment, puts his head back on the pillow and goes back to wandering.

When he wandered, he wandered everywhere. This time he pictures himself in a cottage far away from Beacon Hills, isolated on a craggy coastline that overlooked a rough sea. The wind howled in the rafters. Dream Stiles looked up from his place on a comfortable sofa, reading a book and enjoying the warmth of a fire in the fireplace. He imagined feeling content. There's a leather jacket hanging on one of the coat racks. Real Stiles doesn’t comment on its appearance.

He isn't sure how much time has passed before his dad finally knocks on the door of his room. He must have gotten a text from the school to tell him he never showed because his dad isn't due home until midnight, but that is his voice filtering through the wood. It is worried. Given his son’s night time activities as a supernatural fighting vigilante who runs with wolves, he thinks it is not unfounded.

"Stiles?" He asks, and Stiles wants to scream. “Are you okay?”

“I am fine,” he says, and maybe he says it too vehemently because his dad is opening the door. Stiles tries his best to look sick. “I think I have the flu.”

His dad stops in surprise. “It isn’t a thing, right?”

“It's not.”

His dad looks over Stiles, curled up and listless on the bed. He seems to arrive to a conclusion. “Take all the time you need, son,” he says, and then he is closing the door.

The thoughts in Stiles’ head race ahead of one another and up and down until he doesn’t know where they are going. He is tired and so unbelievably sad and angry that he feels like throwing something and screaming but at the same time wants to be quiet as a shadow and not say a word. He sits on the bed instead. He should really go shower.

* * *

 

Derek Hale paces his apartment wildly, his hands clenched at his sides. Isaac eyes his alpha nervously; Derek’s anxiety had begun to affect the whole pack. Scott was talking at a hundred miles an hour, Erica had been reapplying and then wiping off her makeup for the past half an hour, Jackson was even more of a douchebag and Boyd was struggling to concentrate on the book he was reading, which was so unlike him that Isaac fretted even more.

Finally, Lydia breaks the tension. “Okay, I’ll bite. What is going on?”

Derek starts, as if he had forgotten there were people in the room. He looks up at them and furrows his eyebrows. “My instincts are flaring,” Derek eventually says, and Isaac counts it a pack win, because Derek didn’t say this so much so as admit it. They were climbing up the trust ranks, finally. “I think something is wrong with the pack, but I don’t know what.”

“Everyone is here,” Erica raises an eyebrow at him, and it is right. Lydia and Allison were here, and all the wolves. “There is no one in immediate danger.”

“One person isn’t,” Jackson raises his head from where he had been shooting daggers at the brick wall. “Stilinski isn’t here.” Everyone raises their head at that- the fact that _Jackson_ was the one to realise that Stiles wasn’t around, and the fact that Stiles had never missed a pack meeting before. He was usually the enthusiastic camp leader when it came down to it too.

Derek’s heart skips a beat.

“Stiles said he wasn’t feeling well,” Scott offers, but now he is frowning too. “He did sound sick.”

Derek grabs his leather jacket from where it was hanging off the sofa. Allison tosses him the key to the Camaro. “I’ll be back soon,” he says. His stomach is twisting itself into knots, and dread pervades every fibre of his being. “I need to make sure.”

* * *

 

Stiles has not gone to shower. He is sitting on his bed, frustrated at himself for not moving. It isn’t like he physically can’t, he can and that is what makes it worse.

He is staring at a spot on the black carpet he got from a thrift store when his window slides open. Stiles should be worried. He isn’t. He cannot feel a damn thing.

Derek slips through the window, relieved when he sees Stiles sitting there on the bed. But then his stomach drops out from beneath him when he inhales the scent of misery coming off Stiles in waves, and how Stiles doesn’t even look up to see who it is.

There is a twinge from the left side of the room- from the cupboard, and Derek gives it a curious look before walking over it and placing his hand on the doorknob. He yelps, surprised, and staggers backwards, his hand smoldering. “Rowan?”

“Blessed rowan,” Stiles answers, monotone. “It works I see.”

Derek watches him warily. Stiles curls back up on his bed and hurts. Derek walks over to him and awkwardly stands over him. “Is there something wrong?”

“No.”

“Okay,” Derek looks at him uncomfortably. “No, not okay. Tell me.”

Stiles unwraps himself from the comforter. “I just don’t want to do anything, okay?” He almost adds on a leave me alone, but that is the opposite of what he actually longs for.

Derek looks at him, shakes his head, and sits down on the bed next to him. This close, the smell of hatred and misery is so strong Derek is nearly overwhelmed. He clenches his fists on his jeans, takes a leap of faith and picks Stiles up easily, rearranging him until Stiles was sitting in his lap and holding him. Derek is shocked at how light he is; he is gaunt and pale and his lips are cracking. Derek leans over and takes a cup of water (full) from the bedside table and hands it to Stiles with a grunt.

Stiles looks at him with dim eyes, but takes the water and drinks it down. He sits on Derek’s lap, burying his face into the crook of his neck and drinks in his warmth. He is comforting and touching him, actually holding him and making him feel safe and Stiles wants to scream and sob and punch something to know he is alive. Derek doesn’t ask him to do anything, just holds him, and when Stiles’ shoulders start to shake and the smell of salt invades his senses he doesn’t say anything either.

* * *

 

Derek recalls something about the Nemeton, about what Deaton said. That a darkness would linger like a shadow upon their hearts, and that maybe Stiles’ behavior was that darkness manifesting itself. He is reassured by Deaton that it would go away, pass, like a storm in a sea, but it would be able to come again. It would come again. He doesn’t know when it would happen, nor when this spell would be over. Derek’s instincts tell him to fight whoever is doing this to one of his pack, but he can’t fight Stiles. It is his war to win, but Derek can help.

So when Stiles doesn’t go to school the next day, or the day after that, Derek opens the window to his room and climbs inside. The first thing that hits him again is the misery. Derek feels like he’s been dragged through ice and salt and left to drown. He wonders how Stiles keeps his head above the water, and then realises that how he is doing it is poorly.

Stiles’ lips are chapped, he looks like he hasn’t eaten in days, and his hair is greasy and unwashed. Derek is gently firm with him. He picks Stiles up in a bridal carry and brings him downstairs, where Derek heats up a can of soup and macaroni and makes sure that Stiles eats it all, makes him drink two glasses of water. He sets his phone to charge and then brings him to the bathroom.

“Can you shower?” he asks, not unkindly, and not patronizing either. Stiles feels like he knows what he is going through, remembers the Hale fire and wonders what it did to his mental well-being.

Stiles didn’t want to get out of bed, but now that he is here, he nods and gets in the shower. Fifteen minutes pass, and then Derek goes in to check on him. Stiles is sitting on the floor of the shower, head between his knees. Derek should feel embarrassed, because Stiles is completely naked and he isn’t sure what they are, but he gets into the shower fully clothed and starts to shampoo his hair.

It takes him longer than it should to realize that Stiles is touch-starved. Stiles was always the one touching people- either he made a big show of it, or he just collapsed into your lap and expected you to deal with it. But when he starts to shampoo his hair and Stiles leans into his touch he realizes that no one ever does it back to Stiles, that Stiles touches everyone but doesn’t get the same treatment. He makes a mental note to call a pack meeting and brief everyone beforehand when Stiles is feeling better. He moves on to wash his body, lets him handle the rest.

He steps out of the bathroom sopping wet, and is so distracted that he walks straight into the Sheriff. The Sheriff eyes the cupboard of certain death and then back at Derek in a clear gesture of dominance. “Hale.”

“We weren’t doing anything,” Derek caves, because it has been a long time he was fixed with the disapproving parent glare, and the cupboard of death was really quite terrifying. “He was- he isn’t good now, and I know what it is like to be that way. He has to fight it to get it out of his system but I can help,” the words gush out of him, finally understanding what it meant whenever Stiles smacked him with a rolled up newspaper and told him to use his words. “I’m just trying to help.”

The Sheriff’s frown lets up somewhat. “The darkness from the Nemeton,” the ancient word sounds strange in the Sheriff’s voice. “Deaton called me, and Scott confirmed. He was like this when his mother died too. We both were.”

Derek understands, and he knows that the Sheriff knows he understands. He remembers the fire and the smoke, and the way the smell of guilt never washed off Laura, the way the acrid smell of sadness followed them around no matter how far they ran. He nods, and the Sheriff points at the death cupboard and back at Derek. “I am not afraid to use that.”

There's no change in his heartbeat. Derek flicks his eyes down at him, a quirk to his lips because he hasn't seen the might of a werewolf kept from his mate, or else he wouldn't be this calm. God- his mate, he looks at the door and thinks of his stomach knotting itself and how he just knew and comes to terms with a realization he should've accepted a long time ago. "I know."

The Sheriff sighs deeply, throws him two towels, and then heads the door. Derek takes a deep breath, opens the bathroom door, where Stiles was just getting out of the shower. He gives Stiles  a towel and new clothes, and puts on one of Stiles too-large hoodies and sweatpants.

"Come on," Derek urges gently when Stiles comes out of the bathroom, his hair limp ans sticking to his forehead. "Bed. You need to rest."

"You're not supposed to sleep with your hair wet," Stiles says, his eyes flashing at Derek when he sees him wearing his clothes. 

Derek rolls his eyes. "Get in the damn bed."

Stiles huffs as he climbs in. Derek hesitates, eyes flicking over to the window, but then one of Stiles' hands fall onto his. He gives him a look. "Stay," he says, pleading. "Just for tonight."

Derek can't say no. 

* * *

Stiles got better after that. The next day, he got out of bed by himself. He went back to school on a Friday, and the dread stopped keeping Derek up at night.

That isn’t to say that the misery never came again. Once, Derek’s instincts went crazy, it was getting harder and harder to deny his mate theory, and he found Stiles detonating a homemade chemical bomb in a decommissioned house a few miles out of town. The windows exploded, the glass shards grazing his face and he had laughed.

Sometimes he fought it off without Derek. Stiles was always his own man, and he could win by himself. Derek respected that need for space. Stiles also needed to learn strength of mind. Occasionally, however, Stiles would pick up the phone and Derek would be over in minutes, even if it was to hold him and say nothing. This is one of those times. Derek comes over with Lego Harry Potter to play on Stiles’ Xbox. He loads up the game and despite Stiles’ mumbled protests presses a controller into his hands.

“It is multiplayer,” he insists, and Stiles takes it up. Even when consumed, Stiles was wonderfully inquisitive and intelligent. He solves the puzzles and figures where to go almost immediately, whereas Derek struggles with the tiny buttons beneath his thumbs. When he falls off a platform he’d been trying to reach for ages, he actually growls and flashes his eyes at the screen like it’d help.

It doesn’t. Stiles huffs out a laugh, looking almost fondly at him. Granted, it isn’t the bright sound that Derek is used to, but it is _real._ The laugh echoes down his hollow chest as he took it and etched it into his heart, and suddenly Derek knows he is too far gone. He pauses the game and presses a hand gently on Stiles’ shoulder. He gets the feeling that Stiles wants to ask him something, so he waits there. It takes a while, but he does.

“Why’re you here?”

Derek knows the appropriate response to this. Laura had asked him a million times why he stayed with an alpha who wasn’t much of one. “Why not?” he counters, incredulous without being annoyed.

Stiles’ eyes slide away from him. Derek sighs gently and cups his face in his hands in a gesture of solidarity. “You’re pack, Stiles. We take care of one another,” he mentally puts on his Big Boy Boots and presses his forehead to Stiles’. “And I need you.”

Stiles leans back a bit and kisses Derek’s forehead, giving him a sad smile. “I need you too,” he replies tenderly, and Derek’s heart breaks for a teenager who should never have been more than that.

“I shouldn’t have dragged you into this,” Derek says. If it is Honest Time now, then he shall milk it for all it is worth. “I'm sorry.”

Stiles looks at him, joins their hands together. “I’m not,” he breathes, and just like that Derek knows his theory is right.

* * *

The months pass quietly. Stiles studies and goes to school and runs with wolves at night and things are quiet. Derek should have known it would not last.

“Derek,” the voice on the phone is terrified. It is Scott, and Scott wasn’t made to be terrified. He wasn’t meant to sound exceedingly desperate. “God, Derek, it is Stiles. It’s Stiles and things are bad and you have to get here now.”

“Okay,” Derek says, because he made up his mind when Scott had first said Stiles, because he had also known something was wrong and was standing in front of Stiles’ house. “Where are you?”

Derek breaks several traffic laws along the way to the building Stiles is at. He is at the power plant, and Derek doesn't miss the significance of this. He takes the stairs two at a time, sighing at the broken locks that litter the floor. He bursts out onto the roof, sees Scott and Isaac on one side, whimpering and calling out to a figure sitting on a ledge. It is Stiles.

“Stiles,” he says softly. “What are you doing?”

Stiles swings his feet and snorts. “I am sitting on a roof. What does it look like?”

“It looks like you’re going to fall,” Derek pushes past Scott and Isaac.

“It isn’t as if I haven’t been in worse situations. You remember those Christmas trees?” Stiles snarls. “I am so sick of it.”

“Of what?”

“Living!” he shouts viciously. He leaps to his feet-ignoring Scott’s agonized shout- and turns on Derek furiously. “It is sad and tiring and I am always so fucking afraid, Derek. And just now I thought, what the hell? What am I living for? Not for this, not to be trailed by death and blood and hospital bills. What the fuck is keeping me here? I can't have nice things, they always end up broken or dead. And now, fuck, I am not living for Scott, I am not living for my dad, and I sure as hell am not living for _you_!”

Derek tries not to flinch at the hatred and misery in his voice. “You live for _yourself_ ,” he says firmly, filled with conviction. “You live for the people you could save, you live for the things you haven’t seen but will, but most of all you live for yourself. You don’t put that with anyone else.”

“Oh,” Stiles interjects, voice filled with derision. “And I expect you know all about it?”

“No shit!” he says vehemently. “My whole family died and it was my fault. The smell of guilt chased me and Laura no matter where we went, an acrid burning smell that never let us forget. How many ledges do you think I have sat on? How many times do you think I fell and _healed_? I have a gun with one wolfsbane bullet loaded in it in my nightstand. You think I have never thought about using it?

Stiles seems to deflate, and now he just looks soft and sad, like a lost child. “How did you stop? I can't stop feeling sad.”

Derek sags too. “What makes you think I did?” he whispers, broken, admitting it, finally. Isaac and Scott stiffen beside him, broken too because he was their alpha and the pack took care of one another. “I deal with my ghosts when they come up and get me. I deal with them all because if I take out that gun then they win. They’ve taken enough, they won’t take me, and they’re not going to take you either.”

Stile droops. He looks over the edge again, then back at Derek. He pauses on Scott, and then climbs back over the wall. As soon as he does, Scott tackles him to the ground, holding onto him as if he would never let him go. Stiles grabs him back, crying softly, brothers by choice if not in blood. Isaac tackles Derek instead, gripping onto him so tightly he thought he hurt his bones crack beneath him. “I am taking that gun; you hear me? I am taking that gun, and you are not getting it back.”

Derek pulls him against him, allowing Isaac to sag beneath him. “You stupid alpha,” he murmurs, and Derek thinks that maybe he didn’t just help Stiles tonight, maybe helping Stiles had helped him too.

* * *

 

Derek walks down the stairs of the newly renovated Hale house (renovated at Stiles’ request, but it eventually would have become a whole pack revolution if Derek didn’t agree), not even raising an eyebrow in recognition when he sees Stiles lying on his sofa, scrolling through something on his phone and occasionally laughing. Stiles had been coming over almost every day, sometimes to do nothing but make snide comments about Derek’s interior decorating and Derek in general. Once he used Derek’s money to unleash a bake fest in his new kitchen, covering every surface in flour, two dozens of chocolate chip cookies, a dozen cupcakes and six M&M cookies that were for only for him, but Scott snagged two and Erica took one, so Stiles had bitched as he made another ten. The house had smelt like baked goods for ages.

He sits down next to Stiles, who looks up and gives him a toothy smile when the couch sinks in under his weight. Derek’s heart skips a beat and he is suddenly really glad that Stiles is not a werewolf because he would have a hard time explaining things. He should really tell him that they’re mates, but today there was something else on his mind, and maybe Stiles sensed it, that something was wrong with his mate, because he turned off his phone and nudged Derek’s shoulder gently.

“Laura died today,” Derek says, not beating around the bush. It never was his style. Stiles winces and squeezes his leg in sympathy.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, watching Derek with knowing eyes. They sit in silence for a moment. “Can you tell me about her?”

Derek looks down at him and nods slowly. “She was the gentlest out of all of us. She acted real tough, you know, but she was always kind and willing to give chances. Because of this people tended to gravitate towards her. She would be strict with them but kind, doing what was best for the pack even if it was the harder decision. They liked her because she was fair,” Derek’s throat constricts, and Stiles takes his hand and laces it with his. His hands are cold. They give him strength. “She took no shit, though. Everyone thought that she would be a great alpha, and they were right. But god, she could be such an _asshole_. She hogged the toilet and liked to watch these terrible dramas and had a poster of Orlando Bloom on her wall. She teased me and pulled my hair and one time she broke both my arms by pushing me head first off the roof.”

There is quiet again, Derek struggling to breathe, but telling someone made him feel exponentially better, it was like ripping off a band-aid. “Even after the fire she was still the same,” he whispers. “The last thing she told me before she left was, ‘if I come back and you’ve managed to piss off another pack there will be some serious beating up to be done, little brother.’ She laughed and waved goodbye and the next thing I know I feel her die when I am at a coffee shop and I thought the world had stopped spinning.”

Stiles gets up abruptly and Derek thinks that he has said something wrong, but then he is sliding into Derek’s lap and winding his hands around his neck, pushing his face into the crook of his neck as if he had known that this was exactly what he needed. His breath tickles his neck. Something inside Derek swells and bursts and he holds onto Stiles like a lifeline. “I miss her,” he breathes, and Stiles nods, the movement awkward and jarring.

“I know,” he says, and if anything holds on tighter to Derek.

* * *

 

“Hey!” Stiles stands on the crest of the hill, shouting madly. Derek yells too, it is Stiles and Stiles cannot be here, especially not when there was another alpha standing on Derek’s rib cage and smiling. “Pick on someone who isn’t your size.”

The alpha laughs, eyeing Stiles hungrily. He steps lightly off Derek and does an exaggerated bow. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

Derek immediately rolls over, his three broken ribs loudly protesting this action. He looks up at Stiles, and pales. His eyes are dark, otherworldly, completely terrifying. He looks void. He is holding a gun lazily in one hand, like one would hold a pencil. Stiles smirks down at the alpha, the grin curling its way across his mouth. There is blood on his shirt and it doesn’t belong to him.

The alpha’s stare wavers.

A beta comes out of the trees, howling like a demented thing, but before Derek can move Stiles has raised the gun and shot. Two sharp pips and the beta crumbles- the alpha shrieks when it happens- there is a silencer attached to his gun. Derek doesn’t know what to think. There is a twinge in his gut at the sudden flowery scent in the air and he realizes that Stile has used wolfsbane bullets, and everything is happening so fast he doesn’t know what to do.

Now the alpha is afraid, and not only is he afraid but he is so full of hurt and despair that he rushes Stiles, six feet of claws and teeth. Stiles gently sidesteps the alpha, brings the gun down hard on the back of his head and trains the gun steadily on him. “Did you know that alphas can become omegas?” Stiles asks the alpha, his voice delightfully wicked. “I never knew until today, but I‘m guessing you felt that happen.”

There is no blip in his heartbeat, it is wonderfully calm and dangerous. Derek gets to his feet and has got his hand on Stiles’ shoulder just as Scott, eyes bleeding red, charges into the clearing. His shirt is soaked with blood, and there are scratches on his arms that aren’t healing. He looms over the alpha like a monolith and the alpha cowers from the anger of a gentle man.

Once they’re done dealing with the now packless alpha (depositing him at the edge of Beacon Hills and threatening to blow his balls off if he ever came back), Derek corners Stiles just as he is about to get into his Jeep. The moon is waxing, and underneath the silver light his eyes look molten.

“Before you say anything,” Stiles rambles, because he still has the gun in his hands. “The Nogitsune- information went two ways and when he was gone and you remember the fairies? And one of them jumped me and suddenly I could do this really fucking awesome judo flip and it was amazing yet terrifying so I had Allison and her dad teach me. If you didn’t notice I am usually the one ending up kidnapped or used in rituals or fucking possessed and not being able to defend myself is so last year, and Deaton taught me some moves and I know you don’t trust the Argents but Allison nearly fucking died for us, okay, they’ve helped so much and they’ve helped me, so you should thank them for training your number one human or else you might be dead.”

“Stiles,” Derek shushes him gently, an amused smile on his face. “I was going to say that I am glad you could handle yourself out there. Yes, I’d probably be screwed if you weren’t there.”

Stiles gapes.

“That being said- WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING!” Derek roars at him, channeling his inner alpha. Stiles flinches heavily away from him, but then he is grinning and everything is right with the world. “Next time you want to be a badass motherfucker tell me beforehand because I was fucking terrified, Stiles.”

Stiles takes a step forward until he was very much invading Derek’s personal space. “I was thinking that I didn’t want you to die when I could have helped you live. It was a what if I didn't want to consider.”

Derek blinks at him, speechless. He considers the boy beneath him, with his darkness and his moods and the extraordinary way that he loves. He could turn back, turn away from his feelings and never know. In a fit of reckless abandon, he says firmly, “Stiles, you're my favourite _what if_ ," he places his hands on his hips and pulls him impossibly closer. “If you don't mind, I'd like to kiss you now.”

Stiles stammers, flushing bright red, “yeah, yeah okay, that is perfectly okay-”

Derek cuts him off, a pair of warm lips pressing up to his and thinks that maybe, maybe he deserved nice things. Maybe they both did. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading this :)) you can find me on tumblr @flydeku!


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